In the first post, I reflected on “the swathe of Arthurian-based works for adult readers that dominated 1970s and 1980s Fantasy literature—with the theme continuing to maintain traction through into the 1990s.”

The Junior/YA fiction had a slightly wider sweep, with The Sword in the Stone published in 1938, but there was still a solid swathe of publications from the early 1960s through to the 1990s.

I believe it was a golden era for Arthurian stories, with so many published in such relatively close proximity — but when I look back a little further, to the nineteenth century, I realised that “The Matter of Britain” also enjoyed another heydey then.

Mark Twain, for example, published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889, while Tennyson was writing his famous and popular Idylls of the King between 1859 and 1885. William Morris also wrote a poem titled Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery, in 1858.

So although the Arthurian stories are always with us, from time to time they appear to go through periods of greater-than-usual public popularity. So I would love to see a study that looked at whether there are any detectable trends in common between the two eras …

The one thing that seems certain, however, is that we will keep telling and retelling the Arthurian legends — and that they will enjoy periods of intense popularity again.

"THE HEIR OF NIGHT by Helen Lowe is a richly told tale of strange magic, dark treachery and conflicting loyalties, set in a well realized world."--Robin Hobb

Thornspell

Jacket art by Antonio Javier Caparo

Thornspell is my first novel and is published by Knopf (Random House Children's Books, USA). It won the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2009 for Best Novel: Young Adult and was a Storylines Childrens' Literature Trust Notable Book 2009.